Don’t sneak into No 10, Miliband is warned

One frontbencher suggested Ed Miliband should resign if he finished as few as 12 seats behind David CameronStefan Wermuth/Reuters

Ed Miliband will not have the right to govern if he wins 15 fewer seats than the Conservatives in Thursday’s election, senior Labour party figures have warned.

In a series of interviews with The Times yesterday, parliamentary candidates rejected claims by allies of Mr Miliband that he could become prime minister even if Labour was not the largest party in the Commons. One frontbencher suggested that Mr Miliband should resign if he finished as few as 12 seats behind David Cameron.

Others fear that Labour’s future in key battlegrounds in England would be compromised if he scraped a parliamentary majority only with the help of Scottish Nationalists.

A forecast by Peter Kellner, of YouGov, puts the Tories on 283 seats and Labour on 261, with…